Scholarly Communication @ UT

The Macdonald-Kelce Library has a Transformative Agreement with Cambridge Journals.

UT Corresponding Authors have the opportunity to publish OA Articles in Cambridge OA Journals without incurring any Article Processing Charges.

In order to publish in a Cambridge OA Journal, the Corresponding Author must:

• Have an Article accepted for publication;
• Provide details of his/her affiliation with Licensee (UT), when submitting their Article for publication; and
• Sign a license to publish form or equivalent documentation, as required by the OA Journal publishing the Article, selecting a Creative Commons License in the process

The OA publishing opportunities this agreement offers are only available for articles which have an acceptance date during the Term of this Agreement (agreement started in January 2024).

Articles published non-OA in Cambridge OA Journals during the Term of this Agreement will be eligible for retroactive conversion to OA provided:

• The Article was published during the Term of this Agreement;
• and the request to convert to OA is made within the same Year the Article was published. For example, an article published in March 2024 non-OA will need to be made retroactively OA before the end of 2024. Only the Corresponding Author can request their Article be made OA and this must be done through Payment Processing Software, or correspondence directly with the Licensor.

Please contact Shannon Spencer for more information.

Article Processing Charge (APC)

The costs of publishing an article Gold Open Access are typically supported by an article processing charge (APC). The cost of an APC can be covered in various ways, including by funding bodies, institutions, agreements between publishers and institutions, and sometimes by the author themself. At Cambridge, APCs are often waived for authors who do not have access to grant or institutional funding, to ensure that they do not present a barrier to publication.

Any payment request for an APC is only made after an article has been accepted for publication, and APCs are only applicable for content that is published Gold OA. In other cases no APC is required. (NO APC FEE IS REQUIRED WITH THIS TRANSFORMATIVE AGREEMENT)

May also be known as: Publication fee, OA publication fee

Corresponding author

The person who handles the manuscript and correspondence during the publication process – from manuscript submission, to handling any revisions up to the acceptance and publication of the manuscript. Cambridge uses the affiliation of the corresponding author to determine eligibility for any institutional open access agreements. For full details of the corresponding author’s role and responsibilities when publishing with Cambridge, see our authorship and contributorship policies.

Creative Commons (CC) licenses

Creative Commons (CC) licenses play an important role in facilitating Gold Open Access publishing. They provide a legal framework for giving readers the ability to freely view, download and re-distribute content. We offer authors a choice of Creative Commons licenses that they can apply to their work, which differ in terms of the rights they grant end users. All CC licenses require that those redistributing or re-using the work give appropriate credit and indicate if changes were made. Authors might be required or advised by their funders to choose particular CC licenses, such as CC-BY or CC-BY-ND, when publishing their research as Gold OA. For more information see our guidance on CC licences.

Find more terms here.

The Macdonald-Kelce Library Contributes to Cambridge Open Equity Initiative Fund

As the Cambridge Journals program shifts to majority OA, a growing challenge is the cost barrier for authors publishing without funding. To address this, they’ve announced the Cambridge Open Equity Initiative, a new pilot to financially support OA publishing for authors based in low and middle income countries (a list largely based on Research for Life A & B countries) in partnership with institutions around the world.

The resulting fund will ensure access to fully funded OA publishing across the full Cambridge portfolio, automatically providing 100% coverage of publication cost for an eligible author. The 1.5 year pilot begins in July 2023, ending in December 2024, and Cambridge estimates the scale of eligible research to be around 350 articles per year.